A splash of cold water brought Will back to consciousness. His head was on the table and a tender spot on his forehead. He could smell antiseptic, was aware of someone leaning close to him. He opened his eyes and sat up, slowly.It was a nurse sitting next to him waiting patiently. She wore a protective mask over her face. Her deep brown eyes regarded him impartially as she swabbed his forehead and applied a butterfly bandaid.“You better sit for a while,” she said, gathering her tools into a small kit. At the door she stripped off her latex gloves and dropped them in the wastebasket. Then she left him alone.He surveyed the interrogation room. A fly buzzed around him in slow motion. The fluorescent lights, excessively bright, hummed like a chainsaw cutting through a dark thicket. He thought he could see the officers behind the two-way glass, watching him twist. Watching him try to escape his mental torture chamber. Like the wheel that tightens the screw, his thoughts about Emmy kept circling back. Why hadn’t they just put him on a medieval rack? Or extracted his fingernails? Anything but this.He agonized for what seemed like hours; about Emmy’s unborn baby, his baby; about leather and fire and those last moments of her life. Did she die in torment? Had she been unconscious? Why hadn’t she told him she was pregnant?When they finally let him go, he realized he had only been at the station for a couple of hours. It seemed to Will that Detective Morris was not convinced of his guilt. DeChris was another matter. But why would someone want to kill Emmy? The question pressed against Will, occupying the part of his brain that wasn’t too numb to function. A numbness that he couldn’t count on. Not enough, he knew, to protect him if he went back to his apartment where he would be alone. He wasn’t prepared to be that vulnerable just now, so he stood on the street outside of the precinct trying to decide where to go.The police station was in the Justice Center, a euphemism for county jail. It was situated near the Multnomah County Courthouse, and the Federal Courthouse. Will tried to estimate the number of courtrooms that surrounded him. And for every courtroom, he thought, there are entire floors of lawyers. Since location is everything, almost every building in a ten-block radius contained at least one law office. If he needed a lawyer, one wouldn’t be hard to find. Not that he could afford it. Maybe that was something his ex-wife, Barbara, would be willing to pay for. Or Sondra, his first wife, might pay for a lawyer in order to keep the father of her child out of prison. On second thought, the way Zoe felt about him, her mother might not part with a dime on his behalf.That was probably unfair. Zoe didn’t hate her dad, after all. It was just that the divorce had been so painful for all of them. Will and his daughter couldn’t seem to find solid ground between them. And now thousands of miles separated them.Emmy’s child. Why hadn’t she told him? His hands felt empty. Something, the most important thing, had been snatched out of them.Will pushed the thought away, concentrating instead on deciding where to go instead of the apartment. If it weren’t for Rose Festival, he would have chosen the riverfront. Not that the crowds would be too heavy in this rain. Will began walking across Third. He angled north up the sidewalk that ran diagonally through one of two park blocks situated between Third and Fourth streets. On either side of him, a long row of new steel park benches had recently replaced the old wood and iron benches. The old benches had been deficient in that they allowed vagrants to stretch out and sleep in full view of the magnificent courts that had so far been unable to reform them. A particularly disturbing sight for the mayor, whose newly renovated corner office, in the newly renovated city building, had an unobstructed view of the parks.Rush hour had begun. Cars moved in dense schools. Pedestrians holding tattered, end of the season umbrellas flowed around Will, their faces intense, gray. Within four blocks of the police station, Will was soaked. His shirt clung to his torso and his jeans were tight and heavy. The rain slacked and stopped as he reached the square. Ahead of him, two cops were inviting several young panhandlers to move along. Will didn’t recognize any of them, but he stopped when he came near enough for the cops to notice him. He knew it wasn’t a big deal, the kids would come back in half an hour or so and settle like birds in their roosting place until the cops set them to flight again. It was the same every year during Rose Festival. Mustn’t let the tourists know that the postcard had another viewpoint. It wasn’t a big deal, but they could have been Emmy’s waifs, so he watched the cops with his arms crossed.
“This isn’t your business,” one of the cops said.Will didn’t move or respond. The cop shrugged. The kids moved on.Pioneer Square in the sunlight, still wet from the rain. He recalled that morning at the end of Spring Term. The demonstration. Emmy, waving him into her life. Since he was already soaked, Will gave no thought to the wet concrete and perched on the wide wall lining the square, the amphitheater to his left, westbound light rail on his right. The sun lingered on the edge of a cloud, threatening to expose his horrible pain. He closed his eyes and whispered, “I was on my way to class, Emmy.”

The arrival of a train and the sudden rush of passengers to and fro disturbed Will’s reverie of that day. Laughter and bits of conversation swirled around him. Will kept his eyes closed. He knew that if he opened them it would be June again, and he would have come back from Eugene and there would be a message on his machine. And he didn’t want to have heard that message. Not yet.“The doors are closing. The doors are closing.” And the train moved on, leaving the sidewalk nearly empty and Will, still sitting on the damp wall, fell back into the past.